Between Trauma and Nostalgia. The Intellectual Ethos and Generational Dynamics of Memory in Postsocialist Romania

Public Intellectuals and the Pedagogy of Collective Memory

Riding a wave of testimonies about communist oppression, violence, and victimization, public intellectuals and representatives of the political ‘opposition’ were prominent in articulating the main tenets of the hegemonic framework within which communism was remembered in postsocialist Romania in the 1990s. The term ‘opposition’ emerged around the first free elections in 1990 to refer to political parties sharing a criticism of the ruling coalition of former communist bureaucrats and an avowedly ‘anticommunist’ rhetoric. This legitimizing rhetoric enabled the postsocialist intelligentsia to revive the totalitarian paradigm that had dominated Western Cold War scholarship into the 1980s. Within this framework, public intellectuals argued that the communist regime’s totalitarian grip on Romanian society engendered an essentially ‘sick society’ and a ‘traumatized nation’ that suffered from a series of social ills.^[3] That discourse relied on a heavily pathologizing language, conceptualizing socialist subjects as brainwashed automatons lacking initiative, duplicitous personalities, or atomized and polarized selves divided between a private core and a compliant public persona.^[4] Similarly, socialist societies were portrayed either as homogenized and undifferentiated masses or as infantilized citizenries dominated by paternalist states.^[5]

While providing a reassessment of the past, the dominant memory discourse was equally concerned with the post-revolutionary present. In particular, it legitimized the self-description of intellectuals as an elite whose unique cultural competencies and moral standing placed them in a privileged position to rehabilitate individuals—indeed a whole society—traumatized by communism, thus making them essential to democratic public life. The process of national healing entailed the self-constitution of this postcommunist elite into a strong ‘civil society’ that would derive its ‘moral capital—a capital rooted in defining certain values as correct and upholding them’, from a critique of the communist past.^[6] Whether derived from defending the ideals of ‘civil society’ or ‘nation’ against the party, resistance to the regime, or suffering under communism, moral authority legitimized public intellectuals as they systematically migrated between cultural and political life in the postcommunist period.^[7]

My choice to approach the intelligentsia as a social category defined by the nature of its claims to power and status is not intended to minimize their critical role in postcommunist societies nor to doubt their genuine commitment to values such as ‘civil society’ or ‘anticommunism’. Rather I intend, in the tradition of Bourdieu, to insist on the inherently political nature of knowledge about the social world and the intellectuals’ participation in the articulation of values and categories through which it is perceived and so reproduced or transformed.^[8] This approach is inspired too by Bauman’s observation that ‘any attempt to define intellectuals is an attempt at self-definition’.^[9] While public intellectuals’ self-descriptions typically invoke critical vocation or ability to transcend narrow political interests, my analysis would be better served by conceptualizing cultural elites as a category defined by their strategies of self-legitimation.

Invoking the necessity of a so-called ‘pedagogy of collective memory’, postcommunist elites assigned to themselves the roles of leaders in teaching a traumatized nation how to become a democratic society. Like other East European elites, they drew on the German model to propose a Romanian version of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the untranslatable German term that suggests both reassessment of the past and a sense of retribution.^[10] Repeatedly invoked by Romanian intellectuals in public debates or institutional manifestos, the paradigmatic German model of mastering the historical traumas of the Nazi and communist pasts not only legitimized domestic institutions and practices, but also sanctioned a representation of the totalitarian past as a ‘collective trauma’ and an ethical conception of memory as a form of social justice. As evidenced by its psychoanalytical terminology, the model is rooted in a Freudian conception of psychic trauma and post-traumatic latency, according to which it is not the original experience, but its delayed revival as a memory that acts traumatically.^[11] Projecting individual psychology onto social dynamics, the model implies that collective traumas operate analogously, meaning that traumatized societies are doomed to repeat their totalitarian pasts unless they ‘work through’ shameful experiences, which must be brought into the realm of consciousness by means of testimony and acts of justice and retribution. While attempts to seek restitution for victims and accountability for perpetrators are both understandable and welcome, the model of Vergangenheitsbewältigung perpetuates a problematic assumption that ‘the past must and can be mastered’, one that ignores the ongoing processes of negotiation and contestation informing social memory.^[12] Those processes are consequently pathologized as postsocialist maladies of memory, ranging from so-called ‘social amnesia’—a refusal to remember and assume responsibility for the past—to ‘nostalgia’—a reactionary longing for an idealized past.

The dominant discourse about the socialist past was not the result of a top-down imposition by a politically powerful intellectual elite, such as might be suggested by the term ‘hegemony’. On the contrary, the hegemony of representation was the outcome of struggles for symbolic power and institutional resources waged by intellectual elites occupying the political margins of an increasingly divided Romanian society. Although the elites enjoyed moral capital and social prestige, they faced an uphill battle against a politically victorious party composed chiefly of former communist bureaucrats. For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, these parts of the elite lacked the political power and financial or institutional resources to popularize their national pedagogy beyond urban centres. Moreover, oppositional groups were not monolithic, splitting into competing factions which agreed that anticommunism and its goal of ‘decommunization’ (i.e. the eradication of individual and institutional remnants of communism) was the correct position to take, but disagreed on how best to achieve their goal.

The fact that political resistance to the process of lustration prevented civil society organizations and research institutes from accomplishing their ambitious agendas helped radicalize the anticommunist discourse. Furthermore, politicians with a communist background left the dominant view of the traumatic past largely unchallenged because they deemed it politically inexpedient to reclaim socialism at a time when Ceaușescu’s regime was so widely reviled. In the early 1990s the intellectual representation of the past as a national trauma dovetailed with a widespread resentment of communism that was rooted in the recent experiences of the generalized economic scarcity and political repression of the 1980s. The broad social base of that perception of communism began to narrow by the late 1990s, when the economic recession and rampant unemployment plaguing the rule of the liberal-conservative alliance triggered a shift in the perception of the ‘transition’ from ‘a temporary inconvenience on the road to capitalism to a seemingly permanent discomfort’.^[13]

Even as it lost its social appeal, the dominant narrative of the socialist past became gradually institutionalized. Beginning in the early 2000s, it received growing institutional and financial support and was reproduced by a host of research institutions, museum exhibitions, and educational projects including school curricula and textbooks. The emergence of research institutes funded by various sources—including the Romanian state, the European Commission, or the U.S. and Dutch Embassies—not only encouraged research on the recent past and archival openness, but also continued to subordinate research to understandable concerns with the condemnation and even criminalization of the communist regime. Major research centres such as the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (IICCMR), the National Council for the Study of the Secret Police Archives (founded after the model of the federal German authority for the Stasi archives), or the Romanian Institute of Recent History were designed to aid the processes of political lustration and social catharsis. The normative memory discourse was further enhanced by the creation of a presidential commission for the study of the communist dictatorship. The commission, which brought together renowned Romanian and foreign scholars, issued a report that provided the evidentiary basis for the president’s official condemnation of the communist regime as ‘illegitimate and criminal’ in a statement he made to the Romanian Parliament in December 2006, just weeks before Romania’s accession to the European Union.^[14]

Seeking to overcome both political opposition and ‘social amnesia’, the authoritative discourse about the past crystallized into morally appropriate frameworks of remembrance. No longer open to revision and contestation, the collective frameworks of remembrance acquired a primarily normative function as evidenced by the fact that they now provide the blueprints for the intergenerational transmission of historical memory, teaching postsocialist generations how to remember appropriately the communist past of their parents and grandparents. Despite these efforts, recent opinion polls commissioned and popularized by research institutes like IICCMR have warned that a large percentage of Romanians, especially young people, are now entertaining positive views of communism.^[15] Anxious about the gap between social and institutional memory, public intellectuals attribute it to a deficit of knowledge about the communist past, perhaps the result of ignorance, indifference, or ‘distorted’ memories transmitted via the family that they presume can be redressed only by intensified civic action. That approach not only reinforces the privileged role of intellectuals as interpreters of the past and teachers of the nation, but leaves unquestioned the prescriptive character of hegemonic narratives of communism. Opinion polls that essentially question the possibility of a unified perspective on the past are consequently deployed to reinforce the urgency of a national pedagogy of collective memory.^[16]

Pioneers into Public Intellectuals. The Second Memorial Wave

Over the past decade attempts to institutionalize dominant discourses about the past have coexisted with practices of democratization and commodification of social memory that echo broader Eastern European and global trends.^[17] By comparison with the prominent manifestations of Ostalgie in post-Wall Germany or Yugonostalgia in the post-Yugoslav states, the positive reclamation and commercialization of the socialist past have been significantly more modest and occurred comparatively late in Romania.^[18] Galvanized partly by regional precedents and assessed by domestic commentators in comparison with them, practices of memorialization and musealization of socialist material culture and everyday life proliferated in a diversity of sites. The sites ranged from blogs and websites cataloguing socialist goods and practices, advertising campaigns that revamp socialist products, retro restaurants, and parties that capitalize on socialist aesthetics, to films, documentaries, museum exhibits, and oral history projects.

If the memorial wave of the 1990s pursued a unified national vision of the communist past, the last decade exposed its limits, recovering memories divided along generational, gender, ethnic, or class lines.^[19] Although many memory practices continued to be carried out in state institutions like research centres, universities, or museums, the landscape of memory sites diversified significantly to include films, theatrical productions, musical performances, commercials, or the internet. While it did not disappear, the moral urgency of denouncing communist crimes gave way to a commemorative and even marketing zeal that has been more polyphonic, accommodating various social voices or economic and political interests.

Recollections of late socialist childhood and youth featured prominently in this memorial wave, opening the debate on the socialist past to an emerging generation of public intellectuals. Building on the valorization of ‘experience’ as the most credible form of historical evidence, young writers, journalists, researchers, and academics drew on their experiences of childhood and youth in 1970s and 1980s Romania to engage in a range of experimental autobiographical projects. Invoking their strategic location at ‘the dramatic crossroads of history’, a location that straddles the two political worlds of a communist people’s republic and a capitalist democracy, the authors claimed a distinctively transitional perspective that enabled them to compare these competing political regimes.^[20] Because most projects emerged in informal circles of intellectual friends and appeared in collective volumes, they also facilitated the articulation of a sense of generational commonality.

After such beginnings in informal circles of friends, the autobiographical trend was further popularized by prestigious publishing houses such as Polirom with their nationwide reach. They and other publishers saw a commercial opportunity in the promotion of young authors and the publication of autobiographical genres. One of the first ‘hits’ among Polirom’s ‘ego-documents’ collection was The Lost World. Four Personal Histories (2004), a poignant volume weaving together the childhood recollections of a talented group of young Romanian writers—Paul Cernat, Ion Manolescu, Angelo Mitchievici, and Ioan Stanomir—and effectively spearheading their academic careers.^[21]The Pink Book of Communism (2004), which featured a similar collection of stories of socialist childhood and youth, was conceived as a collective project by a group of writers and journalists from Iași during the same period.^[22] Not least because it was issued by the small publishing house Versus and followed a few months after The Lost World, it received less attention from the press. In 2005, another celebrated publisher, Curtea veche, brought out The Book of Selves, an experimental collection by a group of young anthropologists at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. Their approach was to employ a variety of autobiographical and archival sources as windows onto socialist childhood.^[23] In 2007, Polirom added to its autobiographical collections an atypical memoir of socialist childhood written by a young journalist famous for his incisive social commentary and collections of interviews with marginal social groups. Drawing on skilfully conducted conversations with relatives and former neighbours, Eugen Istodor’s The Book of My Life is an autobiography couched in family and community history. The book’s launch reflected the informality of Istodor’s style, bringing together journalists and comedians for a discussion, held over socialist staples such as grilled meat, beer, and retro music.^[24]

By far the most successful autobiography from among that generation was Vasile Ernu’s debut Born in the USSR (Born), which was published by Polirom in 2006, re-printed three times, and translated into nine languages.^[25] Born in Odessa in 1971, Ernu studied Philosophy at the University of Iași, joining the first cohort of students to come to Romania from the Republic of Moldova in 1990. Although his generation’s arrival in Romania was framed by patriotic discourses, Ernu forewent this regional identity, debuting with a memoir that aligned his intellectual biography with the USSR, ‘the most significant modern project’.^[26] He is now a writer, freelancer, and, after a stint at Polirom, the cofounder and co-manager of CriticAtac, an online platform of left-wing social and political critique. Apart from illustrating the translatability of socialist experiences across national borders within the former Soviet Bloc, Ernu’s autobiographical experiment is central to my discussion because, despite its focus on the Soviet experience, it emerged in the distinctive Romanian context, which it also significantly shaped and challenged.

To understand that context it is important to note the significant cross-pollination that occurred as authors discussed, reviewed, and interpreted each other’s works at shared cultural sites that included magazines, TV shows, universities, museums, and research centres. The spirit of dialogue also encouraged the authors to articulate a self-reflexive discourse on the nature of history and memory. If traditional histories of communism invoked the imperatives of objectivity, archival evidence, and high politics, young authors proposed fragmentary and plural micro-histories retrieved through the deeply subjective and even ‘selffictionalizing’ lens of personal memory.^[27] Where previous testimonies pursued justice and retribution, young memoirists claimed to prioritize understanding. To ward off potential criticism, they also engaged the phenomenon of ‘nostalgia’, distinguishing their endeavours both from the ‘selective amnesia’ of older generations and the ‘fashion’ of Ostalgie afflicting (mostly German) youth with no direct experience of communism.^[28]

While novel in its popularization of young writers, Polirom’s editorial policy continued a testimonial trend inaugurated by a major publisher of the 1990s, Humanitas, whose first collections brought to the public previously banned books, particularly autobiographical genres, as well as disseminating the intelligentsia’s ideological frameworks. Unlike the privatization of large-scale enterprises, which privileged former communist bureaucrats, the privatization of publishing houses such as Humanitas benefited prominent intellectuals, who deployed their assets to shape public opinion.^[29] The Romanian book market has largely avoided the take-over by multinational publishing corporations so characteristic of the fate of similar enterprises in other former socialist countries after 1989, and has been dominated instead by local capital. With a modest annual revenue estimated at 100 million euros at the peak of its economic boom in 2007/2008, it caters to one of the poorest populations and smallest readerships in Europe, ranking below both prosperous industries in the West and regional counterparts in Hungary, Poland, or the Czech Republic.^[30]

The dynamics of the Romanian book market, such things as whose work and what sort of work is published, promoted, and sold are thus driven by both intellectual agendas and commercial calculations, and to some extent, Humanitas and Polirom seem to exemplify two opposite poles. If Humanitas fancies itself as a highly selective, although risk-averse, publisher prioritizing high culture over financial gain, Polirom prides itself on its business acumen and sees itself as being on a mission to democratize the book market by facilitating the debut of young Romanian authors.^[31] Hailed as ‘the Hollywood of the Romanian book market’, Polirom seems to owe its success to ‘an aggressive editorial policy’ described as ‘a predatory American style: […] continuously teasing the market, never letting it fall asleep, and thus extending its absorptive capacity’.^[32]

Polirom inaugurated the new millennium with an ambitious ‘niche’ editorial policy seeking to identify unexploited areas of the market. One of the emerging reading publics Polirom aimed to cultivate was the so-called ‘generation without nostalgia’, postsocialist readers expected to prefer a fresh perspective on the communist past.^[33] The policy dovetailed with the attempt to attract promising young authors—branded ‘the Polirom generation’—to revive the field of domestic literature and scholarship.^[34] Following a ‘western recipe’ of ‘wooing readers’, Polirom launched the works of promising authors with a marketing campaign under the banner ‘Vote for Young Literature’, featuring promotions at the Bookarest book fair in 2004 and various ‘happenings’ at trendy venues in Bucharest.^[35]The Lost World was launched with a show put on by drama students in a pub in downtown Bucharest, after which the authors took part in a discussion. Similarly, the marketing strategies for Vasile Ernu’s Born included a promotional website that registered 4,000 visitors in the first month and a book launch that featured Soviet music and iconography, live music by Moldovan artists, and debates with guest writers at a student club in Bucharest.

Selling the ‘Polirom generation’ to urban educated youth proved a successful business strategy as young people ‘consumed over three hundred Polirom titles’.^[36] However, because it operates in an industry lacking solid studies of the profile of the reading public, Polirom could not afford to ignore the prominent intellectual agendas of the day. For example, hoping to improve their saleability young authors often sought the endorsement of established intellectuals, who attended book launches or wrote prefaces to the young writers’ memoirs.

The postsocialist context of the production and consumption of childhood memoirs indicates that young authors participated not only in an intellectual debate about the past, but also in a common market of ideas and social prestige, mediated by academic networks and the book industry. Serving as a conduit for their competition for status, visibility, and resources, memoirs cultivated not only generational commonalities, but also intellectual and ideological differences that reflected varied and often diverging views of the socialist past.

Communism as Trauma. Childhood and Identity in Ceaușescu’s Romania

Unexpectedly, most autobiographical projects focus on the daily experiences and practices of childhood and youth in late socialist Romania. Framed as a moral duty of individual and collective significance, the memoirs centre on the child’s developing personality as a means to explore the tenuous process of growing up to become a socialist citizen at the intersection of subjective experiences, family relations, and pressure from the regime. Echoing totalitarian theories of socialist subjectivity and Freudian conceptions of trauma and identity development, these autobiographical narratives can be seen as responses to the ethical injunction to ‘work through’ the communist past. The co-authors of The Lost World attribute the impetus to write their memoirs to political anxieties at the turn of the millennium, when liberal-conservatives lost ground to social democrats in a climate of economic crisis in Romania. Marking the return to power of former communist bureaucrats in 2000, the electoral loss symbolized a failure of political anti-communism that left the writers looking for ‘a renewed sense of purpose to our anti-communism’.^[37]

The result was an autobiographical quest for the existential roots of anticommunism, which were found in the repressed past of their childhoods. Socialist childhood and adolescence emerge in these memoirs as traumatic experiences of ‘de-formation’.^[38] In his ‘Survival under a Glass Bell’, Paul Cernat uses the metaphor of an autistic childhood to tell a grim story of individual survival in a political universe that turns children of kindergarten age into obedient informants for the regime. Ioan Stanomir’s ‘The Mornings of a Good Boy’ paints a picture of a childhood that remained happy and carefree only as long as it was sheltered from the outside world of the socialist regime. Eugen Istodor’s The Book of My Life is simultaneously a family history and an adopted child’s memoir of orphaned childhood.

These distorted child-figures—the autistic, the sheltered, the orphan child— emerge as progenies of the distinctive economic, social, and political developments of the socialist regime. In both Stanomir’s and Cernat’s autobiographies, for example, the child’s experience of growing up to be a socialist subject is illustrated by the spatial contrast between an idyllic old world and the intrusive new world of socialist modernity ushered in by fast-paced urbanization and industrialization:

‘I lived the first three years of my life in total “wilderness” in my “grandparents’ house”, spitting, biting and swearing at other children or guests who wandered into the paradisiacal garden. At three, my parents took me back to our apartment building in Bucharest. The autistic paradise was brutally destroyed, making room for a new world, from which I could find no escape. Scared of the concrete buildings, I tried to run away, but I was slowly domesticated.’^[39]

The precommunist past is recurrently evoked by the endurance of intergenerational bonding, the attachment to fin-de-siècle neighbourhoods, and a predilection for the prewar literature of country estates and old boyars, who were the landowning elite of the nineteenth century Old Kingdom. The object of childhood nostalgia in The Lost World is decidedly not the socialist regime, but the precommunist past that grandsons identify through their aging grandparents or literary representations of a differentiated social life that preceded the social homogenization under socialism. The memorial return to early childhood reestablishes a historical and political symbiosis with grandparents, who are survivors of a world untainted by communism. If child-protagonists are in a symbiotic relation with the old world, living in a natural state of ‘wilderness’—‘biting, spitting, and swearing’—they experience the socialist process of socialization as an ‘unnatural’ act of domestication.

Socialist socialization begins for Cernat’s protagonist when he is ejected from his grandparents’ garden idyll into the new world. Defined by an alienating urban landscape of standardized blocks of flats and by socialist rituals of socialization, the new world threatens to dissolve the child’s individual character into the collective. Assailed by propagandistic attempts to control his thoughts and loyalties in kindergarten and primary school, the child’s self-defence mechanisms produced a schizoid identity polarized between a public persona, who dissimulates loyalty, and an authentic self:

‘As a result of my pathological fear of the Party and the secret services, I developed a hypertrophied inner life. This sense of fear inhibited my spirit of initiative, prevented me from truly expressing myself, turned me into a fearful, secretive and suspicious child, and made me dependent on an authority which I preferred to obey formally in order to conserve my inner freedom and contemplative comfort.’^[40]

By comparison, in Ioan Stanomir’s narrative the child’s initial isolation in the old world survives the transition to the city. Sheltered by his family, an intergenerational chain of parents and grandparents to whom he has reserved all his loyalties, the protagonist does not integrate fully into socialist society. Never completely outside its reach, the child fails to internalize the regime’s inextricably mixed socialist and nationalist propaganda:

‘Like any good child and proper young man, I became first a Fatherland’s Falcon, then a Pioneer, and, finally, a member of the Youth Union. I was a child of socialist Romania, who never loved the country in his school textbooks. […] The only “motherland” I ever truly loved, with a mystic devotion, was my grandparents’ street in the town where I was born.’^[41]

Besides the protective role of the family, early immersion in reading sheltered the protagonist from the regular mechanisms of social integration. Books and the passion for reading are central to the creation of a sense of identity in The Lost World, drawing a tentative profile of the socialist nerd, an identity exploited for its potentially asocial and subversive nature. Memoirists recall the transformative power of literature, which was more immediate, indeed more real, than the protagonists’ everyday existence. They recollect ‘childhoods lived bookishly through the magic lens of literature’, exploring how ‘the world came to resemble [their] readings’ and how ‘fiction became self-sufficient, colonizing [their] world’.^[42] The act of reading is invested with the urgency of a survival strategy: ‘I read chaotically, indiscriminately, I read whatever I could get my hands on.’^[43] The protagonists’ escapism found satisfaction in fairy tales and adventure or travel novels, among which Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, and Jack London held pride of place, but other genres, whether Greek mythology, detective or historical novels, romance literature, or science fiction, also served the desire to evade. What was important was the subversive power of reading, the realization that ‘fantasy worked in ways the Party could not fathom’.^[44]

With these arguments, young memoirists echo the anticommunist agenda of the postsocialist intelligentsia of the 1990s. Their ideological affinity is often illustrated by intergenerational dialogues, conducted at book launches or recorded in the pages of the memoirs. The Lost World, for example, concludes with a dialogue between the four authors on one side and Horia-Roman Patapievici on the other. Patapievici is a prominent public figure widely known for his rallying calls for intellectual leadership in mastering the communist past. Indicative of the discursive affinity between aspiring and already venerated public intellectuals, who all invoke the communist regime’s successful strategies of social engineering—‘infantilization’, ‘brainwashing’, and ‘mental slavery’—the dialogue serves as an interpretive framework for the memoir.^[45]

Echoing Cernat’s exploration of the encounters between the child and disciplining authorities, Eugen Istodor’s The Book of My Life represents the process of growing up in terms reminiscent of Freud’s structural model of personality development, focusing on the clashes between the id and the superego, between primitive impulses and ethical constraints. Cernat’s model of autistic childhood is essentially a victory of the id over the superego since the child’s most primitive survival impulse defeats the ethical and political imperatives of the communist regime. By contrast, Istodor’s narrative of childhood is a complete victory for the superego that begins with the child’s internalization of norms and ends in total loss of identity. With the gradual repression of the id, valorized here as the source of authenticity and genuine desires, individuals turn into automatons inhabited by the regime and its laws:

‘Since I was very little, I struggled to forget the trespassing that violated the rules of the system. This game turned me into a little boy without memories. When I was not disobeying my mother, I was disobeying my schoolteachers, and I lived with a permanent sense of guilt. I was the child of the authorities. I was a child nobody talked to or listened to, I was born into the system and I had to keep growing with it.’^[46]

By comparison with the valorization of a sheltered world in The Lost World, however, Istodor’s oral history locates childhood in those quintessential spaces of socialist modernity, the block of flats and the kitchen. Dominated by his mother’s presence, the red kitchen of Istodor’s childhood memories functioned as a threshold between the intimate world of the family and the larger community of neighbours. Thrown open to neighbours keen to chat over coffee and cigarettes, the kitchen enabled communication between the private and the public, eventually becoming a metaphor for the impossibility of intimacy and privacy in a totalitarian society. For the child-protagonist, the kitchen is the site of maternal betrayal, the place where the secret of his adoption was shared casually during a ‘gossip session’ with the neighbours.

Unlike the socialist society depicted in The Lost World, the social world portrayed by Istodor is not the result of an imposition of totalitarian power from above, but an elaborate network of dependencies, loyalties, and betrayals reproduced in everyday interactions, whether exchanges of products and services or gossip and rumour. The communism recovered through communal memories is a disturbingly intimate one that cannot be confined outside the safe borders of the family. Istodor’s oral history revisits a pervasive dichotomy deployed to rationalize social life under socialism. The distinction is between the private sphere of the family where individuals expressed themselves allegedly freely and authentically, and the state-controlled public arena.

Challenging this entrenched representation, the book joins a small number of childhood memoirs that read like family dramas, positioning the family ambiguously at the juncture between the private and the public, representing it as the first incarnation of the system, or as the first manifestation of disciplining authority in the child’s life. One of the most poignant pieces in The Pink Book, Gabriel Decuble’s ‘Parents Made the Mistakes, And Children Suffered the Consequences’ depicts personal growth as a two-fold act of resistance against the father, ‘a true communist’, and against the logic of the communist regime that the father insinuated daily into his son’s life.^[47] In much the same way the parallels between a domineering mother and a paternalist socialist state abound in Istodor’s text. Before the socialist state could demand his loyalty as a member of its youth organizations or informant of the secret police, it was the boy’s family who claimed his loyalty and obedience.

In Istodor’s memoir, which repeatedly encourages the audience to read collective destiny in the coordinates of personal biography, the boy’s relationship with his mother replicates that of an infantilized citizenry with a paternalist state. On a personal level, the process of growing into one’s character is achieved only in violent separation from the mother, a process that begins with the retrieval of repressed memories, including the protagonist’s recognition that he was an adopted child. The process is completed with his mother’s cremation, a mirror metaphor of the execution of the presidential couple in 1989. Much like the protagonist of Istodor’s autobiography, who discovers the long-held secret of his adoption in the process of writing his own life story, Romanian society is invited to undergo a similar process of demystification of its origins, a separation from the political father figure in order to reach social and historical maturity.

Communism as Utopia. Childhood and Community in the USSR

Initially envisioned as a collective project to produce a lexicon of Soviet life, Vasile Ernu’s Born was described as a hybrid genre integrating autobiography with historical analysis and cultural criticism.^[48] With its provocatively nostalgic reclamation of revolutionary Soviet ideals, critique of the postsocialist embrace of capitalism, and ambiguous mixture of nostalgic and ironic registers, the book made a distinctive contribution to intellectual debates in Romania, a distinctiveness that was acknowledged by both major literary awards and countless reviews. If memoirs of Ceaușescu’s Romania documented a regime Ernu dismissed as ‘banal’ or ‘boring’, the author’s purpose was to explore ‘the matrix of communism’ and recover the original revolutionary experience.^[49]

Ernu’s exploration draws on both ‘the direct experience of a Soviet citizen’ and ‘a culturally mediated experience derived from books’, using autobiographical recollections of the author’s childhood and youth in the 1970s and 1980s as a springboard for analyses of the Soviet project from the Bolshevik revolution to the regime’s dissolution in the 1990s.^[50] Autobiography serves as the pretext to write the history of ‘the most grandiose utopian project” of the twentieth century, ushering in the constitutive events, heroes, and experiences of homo sovieticus, from the Bolshevik revolution, the komunalka, the Second World War, to the May Day parades, the conquest of space, the creative culture of drinking, or the local rock music scene.^[51] Soviet history is effectively narrated from the first-person perspective of a generic homunculus, Ernu’s term of choice for the new Soviet citizen born of the intersection of official policies with unofficial practices. Figured as a politically innocent child-protagonist, the homunculus is either doubled by a critical adult-narrator or featured in positions of over-identification with the regime, two strategies that allow Ernu to evoke the Soviet experience in a simultaneously nostalgic and ironic register. The narrative strategy aims to convey both the genuine appeal of Soviet ideology and its resulting failures, paradoxes, and brutality. Because the interplay cultivates ambiguity, the line between the positive reclamation of Soviet ideals and their critique can never be clearly drawn, leaving both reviewers and the author significant room for manoeuvre in public debates about meaning.

The earliest critique of Ernu’s memoir was published as an afterword to the book itself. Following the tradition of securing the support of consecrated intellectuals, Ernu invited historian Sorin Antohi, ‘a domestically and internationally reputed scholar’, to contribute concluding remarks to his memoir.^[52] Although Antohi praised Ernu’s dark humour, he read the memoir as essentially a case of ‘imperial nostalgia’, a self-defeating reclamation of a Soviet world ‘with a human face’.^[53] While some reviewers followed Antohi’s lead and criticised Born for encouraging a nostalgic longing for communism, or marketing an unabashedly leftist ideology under the cover of autobiography, their response to Born was predominantly favourable.^[54] Many commentators praised Born’s spirit of novelty, welcoming it as a belated local version of Ostalgie.^[55] Even the most vociferous critics were seduced by the spirit of cultural ‘difference’, appreciating the author’s skilful deployment of dark humour in the classical Russian literary tradition of Ilf and Petrov.^[56] Other reviewers observed astutely that the ambivalently nostalgic-ironic tone weakened the author’s projected reclamation of leftist politics, which, as we shall see, was carried out ‘under the cover of an infantile perspective’ attributed to the politically naïve child-protagonist rather than the adult-narrator.^[57]

Reflecting a similar structural dichotomy, the relation between the autobiographical and the historical is captured by a narrative voice that shifts seamlessly between the ‘I’ of personal experience and the ‘we’ of collective Soviet history, claiming the authority to speak for both. The ease with which the narrator-protagonist travels beyond strictly biographical time to the origins of the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin’s struggle, Stalin’s rule, Khrushchev’s thaw, or Brezhnev’s stagnation is justified by the utopian character of the Soviet experiment, which abolished not only historical determinations, but also distinctions between real life and its ideal representation:

‘In the USSR, I could never understand where story-telling ended and life began, where life ended and story-telling began. We were perpetually living among our heroes, among our enemies. That is why, in the USSR, you did not have to be born at the beginning of the twentieth century to be contemporary with Lenin. Those of us born in the 1970s were also contemporary with him.’^[58]

Evoked by the symbolic timelessness and idealism of childhood, the notion of utopia as an ideal community that transcends spatial and temporal determinations is central to Ernu’s reclamation of the Soviet project. Irreducible to any particular historical time or space, Ernu’s USSR is essentially a universe of ideals and aspirations. It is the child figure who serves as the embodiment of unspoiled Soviet idealism, genuinely seduced by noble revolutionary goals and heroes, and inhabiting a universe populated in equal measure by fictional and real-life heroes. From Lenin, who speaks to the young protagonist through his pioneer insignia and the pages of his ABC book, the child absorbs a romantic attachment to grand ideals:

‘I loved and respected Vladimir Illici Lenin. So alive, dynamic, and animated by grand principles and goals. What a pity he was replaced by Stalin, whom I kept at a safe distance. Neither love, nor hatred.’^[59]

The young protagonist learned from Pavlik Morozov, the child-hero who betrayed his father to the authorities, the importance of sacrificing individual interest to the greater Soviet good.

However, respect for official revolutionary heroes coexisted with fascination for an array of anti-heroes, ranging from Ostap Bender, Ilf and Petrov’s famous fictional confidence trickster, to characters created by Soviet writers who found refuge from censorship in children’s literature. Alexei Tolstoi’s hero Buratino is a subversive who teaches young readers how ‘to question rules and fight stereotypes or stupidity’, making up for what he lacks in intelligence with everyday courage and creativity.^[60] Nikolai Nosov’s Dunno, more concerned with dressing fashionably than working hard or defending noble ideals, is a similarly unconventional character whose unpredictability appeals to child-readers. Interpreting Dunno’s constant battles with his alter ego, Know-It-All, as a dramatization of ‘the struggle between the official and unofficial’ in Soviet culture, Ernu suggests that the fictional couples of children’s literature transcended conflict, reinforcing the ideal of friendship and camaraderie.^[61]

The ideal of friendship practised by the young protagonist in Soviet institutions such as pioneer camps, clubs, or team competitions points to another essential element of Soviet utopia: communal life. It is no accident that Ernu chooses the komunalka to stand as ‘a micro-ussr, the synthesis of Soviet civilization’.^[62] Revealing his qualities as cultural essayist, Ernu ranks the Soviet experience of communal living far above the arcadias envisioned by a long tradition of utopian thinking, from Morus and Campanella, to Owen and Fourier, to Bacon and Huxley. Much of Ernu’s ironic-nostalgic celebration of the communal focuses on the kitchen and the lavatory, both of which are seen as cradles of Soviet identity. In his provocatively ironic style, Ernu locates the protagonist’s reading practices and thus, the seeds of his intellectual genealogy, not in the secluded reading room but in the communal Soviet lavatory:

‘The [communal] toilet is the quintessence of collective intimacy. […] It is the ideal reading hall and the place that produced the most remarkable Soviet intellectuals. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the Soviet school, libraries, or universities deserve the greatest credit for our education.’^[63]

In the author’s view, such intimate communal spaces cultivated a deeply communitarian identity that stands in contrast with Western individualism and materialism.

To reconstitute the distinctiveness of the Soviet project, Ernu contrasts the USSR, with its archenemy and constitutive other, the West. Supporting the author’s claim that he structured the book as a dialogue between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘the Soviets’ and ‘the Americans’, a number of chapters address an imaginary ‘Western’ reader, who seems existentially unable to comprehend distinctive Soviet experiences.^[64] This essentializing, even self-exoticizing, difference, meant to appeal to Western readers, is also an indication of Ernu’s ambition to reach out to readers beyond Romania. Contemplating the publication of his memoir in Germany, the author noted in an interview that ‘difference’ is a precondition of saleability: ‘The West expects difference from us. Cultural production today is based on difference, not repetition.’^[65] The often heated arguments about Born were in fact instrumental in Ernu’s programmatic cultivation of ideological and intellectual difference. While Ernu himself suggested that his strategy of difference and provocation should be understood in terms of critical positionality— ‘I like to make contradictory, even shocking, statements, to make people ask questions’—it is clearly also one of public visibility and marketability.^[66] If journalists can claim that ‘Vasile Ernu is himself a brand’, it is because he proved uniquely adept at performing his ideological difference with characteristically affable provocation, humour, and even a (self-)described ‘proletarian’ hat in both public and published appearances.^[67]

Featuring a protagonist fully immersed in Soviet life after integration in school and pioneer rituals, participation in official and unofficial practices, and consumption of Soviet cultural productions, Born articulates an alternative to memoirs of Ceaușescu’s Romania that focus on traumatic experiences of social homogenization and individual alienation. Autobiographical recollections of the collapse of Ceaușescu’s regime tend to emphasize the sense of dramatic rupture that made new democratic ideals possible, but Ernu’s account of the silent dissolution of the Soviet regime in the wake of perestroika is decidedly nondramatic, in fact anticlimactic. It inspires reflections on historical continuities rather than historic breaks: ‘If the world we experienced was centred on political repression, the world we just commenced is based on economic repression.’^[68] Indeed, Ernu has repeatedly described his reconstruction of the Soviet system as a critique of the postsocialist present, characterized by the indiscriminate embrace of neoliberal values by Romanian politicians and intellectuals.

Conclusions. Childhood Memoirs as Ideological Genealogies and Intellectual Biographies

Audiences—journalists, literary reviewers, or ordinary readers—welcomed memoirs of socialist childhood for expanding the scope of social memory and inaugurating a novel approach to the past that overcame feelings of resentment, revenge, or guilt. If the project of ‘mastering’ the past strove to approximate the German model, the memorialization of childhood seemed to find a precedent in Ostalgie. Published shortly after the successful showing of Wolfgang Becker’s film ‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ in Romanian cinemas in 2003 these autobiographical projects came out in a climate of revalorization of socialist everyday life. They overlapped with the emergence of social media projects to memorialize socialist childhood and were therefore seen to pioneer a similarly warm, detached, and ironic view of communism.^[69] Emphasizing the memoirs’ novelty, marketization strategies further reinforced the view that the new autobiographical wave represented a welcome synchronization with broader Central European trends. While Ostalgie was occasionally dismissed as a consumerist fad posing as leftism, many Romanian commentators, the memoirists included, typically envisioned it as a sign of social maturity, of post-traumatic closure made possible by successful mastery of the past. If Germans could return to their traumatic communist past with detachment or humour, it was because they had found satisfactory answers to questions of accountability and responsibility.^[70]

But could Romanians accomplish the same feat? With their focus on the banality of daily life rather than the exceptionality of suffering under communism, childhood memoirs contributed to the diversification of social memory and questioned totalizing and morally unambiguous claims to historical truth. In their interpretive framework autobiographical evocations of Ceaușescu’s Romania remained surprisingly consistent with institutionalized representations of the past. While childhood memoirs complicate the picture with insights into how ordinary Romanians were implicated in the reproduction of the regime, their emphasis on the distortion of individual and collective identity reinforces the totalitarian view of an atomized society and polarized individual. The only alternative to that dominant representation was formulated by Vasile Ernu, an ideological outlier who focused his autobiographical project on the original Soviet model rather than on Romanian experience. By comparison with his generational colleagues, Ernu surprised readers with an exuberant Soviet world populated by idealist, deeply communitarian, and creative individuals who moved nonchalantly between official and unofficial spheres.

Whether they engaged with the hegemonic memory discourse through affirmation or contestation, memoirs of socialist childhood testified to the authors’ formative experiences under communism, offering them a platform to articulate their intellectual biographies and ideological genealogies. Cast as stories of a ‘prematurely lost political innocence’, memoirs of Ceaușescu’s Romania were instrumental in locating the seeds of an oppositional identity in childhood.^[71] As children of urban intellectuals, the protagonists devoured an eclectic array of literature in an attempt to conjure up fictional universes that could compensate for the stifling socialist reality and counter the brainwashing effect of collective state education. While eclectic, the readings were neither selected from the socialist cannon nor read in ideologically appropriate ways, drawing on an intellectual genealogy indebted not to socialist ideas but to traditional liberal values of presocialist and European provenance. The child’s voracious reading habits became a metaphor for a precocious critical spirit that carried the promise of oppositional intellectuality waiting to be reclaimed by adult memoirists.

Although it articulates a competing, leftist ideological position, Born is similarly instrumental in drawing the profile of a critical intellectual-citizen. It does so by featuring reading as a means of immersion in a rich Soviet culture rather than escape from it. Although decidedly Soviet, the protagonist’s reading choices suggest an ideological genealogy indebted as much to the ideals of official heroes—whether party leaders like Lenin and Bukharin or mythologized child figures such as Pavel Morozov—as to the subversive and questioning attitude of anti-heroes. Concluding his memoir by challenging the neoliberal regime of postsocialism with the quintessential revolutionary question—Lenin’s ‘What is to be done?’—Ernu defines himself as a critical intellectual of leftist persuasion.^[72]

If memoirs served to reclaim oppositional intellectuality, the metanarrative context of their promotion and consumption further facilitated the authors’ entry into the intellectual elite. The public space generated by promotional book launches, published reviews, or debates at major academic centres in Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara, and Iași expanded both intellectual networks and the boundaries of intellectual sociality. Whether they responded to reviews, gave interviews, or participated in round tables, young authors enjoyed significant public visibility, engaging actively in the process of interpreting their own autobiographies and biographies as well as the communist past. Organized at book launches and published as prefaces or concluding remarks to childhood memoirs, intergenerational conversations with established public intellectuals were also an integral part of the process of socialization.

The dynamics of the Romanian book market can explain why autobiographical productions fulfil a primarily socializing function. Although most of the memoirs analysed in this article were advertised as bestsellers, it is worth recalling that barely one or two thousand copies were sold and that, with the exception of Ernu’s memoir, none was either reprinted or translated.^[73] With such a modest audience, most memoirs of socialist childhood probably stayed in the family, to be read by fellow writers, journalists, academics, students, and the urbaneducated youth targeted by Polirom’s campaigns. These market dynamics make writing, even the writing of a bestseller, an unprofitable business from which most authors can barely earn a living. However, what publication can offer young authors, especially when doubled by promotion with major publishers like Polirom, is public visibility and enhanced intellectual prestige.

Claiming that the communist past was central to political contests and cultural debates in the postsocialist period, this article has explored how a generation of aspiring writers accessed the public sphere with their most valuable symbolic currency, their personal experience of communism. Compelled by perceived contemporary challenges—whether the failure of political anticommunism or the unchallenged victory of neoliberalism—young authors mobilized their memories of childhood to articulate ideological and intellectual biographies. Although shaped by concerns with profit and marketability, published memoirs have largely escaped the logic of the market. Due to their modest Romanian readership, intellectual memoirs remained largely a family affair, addressing an audience of intellectual peers and mentors and thus socializing aspiring writers into the ethos of the postcommunist intelligentsia. These dynamics can explain why, despite isolated attempts at ideological contestation, this generational cohort failed to articulate a compelling alternative to the hegemonic framework of remembrance. At the same time, they suggest the limits of this hegemony of representation. To the extent that it functions as the preferred idiom of intellectual sociability, the dominant representation of the past as a collective trauma remains effectively divorced from social memory, which has registered a tendency towards positive reclamation of the past. As opinion polls seem to indicate, the pedagogy of ‘working through’ the traumatic past has largely failed to align public opinion with institutionalized memory, and remains a conceit of public intellectuals.